ABOUT Matt Shipman

Matt Shipman is a science writer and public information officer at North Carolina State University, where he writes about everything from forensic anthropology to computer malware. He previously worked as a reporter and editor in the Washington, D.C. area for Inside EPA, Water Policy Report and Risk Policy Report, covering the nexus of science, politics and policy.

In his free time, Shipman runs a non-profit organization called the First Step Project that has nothing to do with science, plays guitar badly (but with enthusiasm) and keeps track of the juvenile humans who live in his house. You can follow him on Twitter: @ShipLives.

Shipman is also the author of The Handbook for Science Public Information Officers (2015, University of Chicago Press) and a contributing author to The Complete Guide to Science Blogging (2015, Yale University Press).

Anyone interested in hiring Shipman for freelance writing or editing projects can reach him at shiplives[at]gmail.com.

Matt Shipman: All Posts

Finding effective and efficient means of sharing information is a key challenge for anyone involved in science communication – and that’s particularly true for large-scale health systems, in which data inform a wide range of decisions related to both policy and practice. To learn more about some of the challenges and opportunities in this arena, I talked to Dr. Geraint Lewis, chief data officer of the National Health Service in England. Communication Breakdown: Before we get into your work as... Read more

I first met Vanessa Hill in early 2014 while touring a forensic anthropology lab in North Carolina. At the time, she was working for Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation and had recently launched a web series called BrainCraft that explored issues related to psychology and neuroscience. Fast forward about a year and Hill is living in the U.S. and working full time on BrainCraft, which is now part of PBS Digital Studios. I recently had the chance to... Read more

If you think science should inform policy decisions or you just want to ensure that there is continued government support for scientific research, you should be alarmed by a new report from the Pew Research Center. Here’s the short version: the U.S. public is markedly less supportive of federal science funding than it was five years ago, and is less likely to be swayed by science on policy issues. This should be a wake-up call to the science community: science... Read more

Science communication and citizen science have a lot in common – namely, the desire to engage with people both inside and outside of the traditional science community. But where science communication is often seeking only to educate or to get folks interested in science, citizen science is trying to get people actively involved in the scientific process. Citizen science can take many forms – from “games with a purpose,” such as Phylo, to projects that have people collecting ants from... Read more

A new paper offers up a “top 10” list of science communication (scicomm) challenges and potential solutions – but also highlights the flaws in the list. I’m hoping it can be a starting point for a discussion that could help people address at least some of the scicomm problems they’re grappling with. Background Here’s the deal: science communication can be a tricky business. It can be defined in a wide variety of ways, and includes a host of different interests... Read more

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Robin Bisson. Bisson is a former staffer at the UK’s Science Media Centre, and is launching a similar initiative in the US that focuses solely on issues related to genetics and biotechnology. He describes the new initiative here. During the last few weeks I’ve frequently had two scenarios described to me. One: a scientist gets frustrated about the latest misinformation about their field playing out in the media, and would like to... Read more

Scientific American posted an announcement Dec. 15, stating that editors will be “reshaping” the Scientific American Blog Network and releasing new editorial guidelines for the network. What wasn’t entirely clear in the post, titled “A New Vision For Scientific American’s Blog Network,” was that a number of blogs on the network have been eliminated. The Dec. 15 post does not say that any blogs have been cut, but as soon as the post was published a number of announcements began... Read more

A new study from the BMJ highlights the link between exaggeration in news releases about health-related research and exaggeration in news stories about that same research. And, in a timely coincidence, a project based out of the University of Minnesota has announced that it will be holding people accountable for misleading news releases. A paper describing the work, “The association between exaggeration in health related science news and academic press releases: retrospective observational study,” by Petroc Sumner, et al., was... Read more

Reporters and bloggers write in a variety of styles for a variety of audiences, but one of the things that every blog post or news item needs to do is explain to readers why the writer is telling this story now. What’s the news hook? Science stories are often reactive, meaning that the story was written in response to some external event that the writer had no control over – such as the publication of a journal article or a... Read more

On Nov. 12, a robot launched by the European Space Agency (ESA) about ten years ago landed on a comet approximately 300 million miles away. Which is (literally) awesome. But this blog is about science communication, so I want to talk about a shirt. One of the ESA staffers prominently featured in coverage of the landing was Matt Taylor, who is head scientist on the project. Taylor is an intelligent guy, but he made the unfortunate decision to wear a... Read more